How to Choose Profitable Keywords for Writing on Infobarrel Part Two

Analyzing Keywords

If you followed the steps in How to Choose Profitable Keywords for Writing on Infobarrel Part One, you should have chosen a niche or two and generated a list of keywords. Your job now is to go through those keywords and decide which ones are worth pursuing. You need to consider how many searches a keyword gets, what its click through rate will be, what each click will be worth, and how tough the competition is. This might seem like a lot, but once you get used to doing this for all of your articles it will become second nature. More of your articles will become profitable without you needing to write as much.

Search Volume

The first thing you want to do is to consider the search volume. Unfortunately, search estimates are notorious for being inaccurate. In fact, Google has recently slashed the number of searches it is displaying in its tool to improve accuracy. So you will sometimes find that articles that you think will get tons of visits are rarely seen and some articles are surprise hits.

A lot of people have formulas for the number of searches that they want to see before they'll go after a keyword. This number might be 100 exact matches a day or at least 1000 phrase matches a month. I don't have a hard and fast rule for a couple of different reasons. One reason is that I often write reviews about new products or seasonal items. If you wait for a new product to be showing up with good numbers in the keyword research tools, you've missed the boat and possibly a lot of sales or clicks. If you are writing seasonal articles you can look at Google trends to see how often the term was searched for last season, but it is hard to predict how it will do this year.

Another reason why I don't have one rule about the number of keywords is that I know that different keywords will require a different amount of work and will provide me with a different income. If I see that a keyword will be hard to rank for and I'll need to spend several hours backlinking it, I want it to get thousands of searches a month to be worth my time. If there isn't much competition and I can rank easily, it might be worth my time to write an article around a phrase that only gets 100 searches a month. In addition to the work that will be needed, I think about the money it will bring in. If each click will average a dollar or more, I don't need a lot of traffic to make it worth my while. For articles that only give me a dime per click, I'll need a lot of searchers to make a profit.

Are There Advertisers?

Now you should have a list of keywords that you are interested in pursuing. We have a couple of more steps that we need to take to make sure that there will be plenty of Adsense advertisers for each term. This way we won't be stuck displaying public service ads on our articles.

All you have to do is go to Google, type in your phrase, and hit enter. If you have AdBlocker installed in your browser, be sure to disable this first. For example, type in Canon digital cameras in the Google search engine and you will see that there are lot of ads displayed. So we know that our articles would have a lot of relevant ads next to them that people would want to click on. Long-tail keywords which may be phrases that are four to six words long often won't have as many ads in the search, but as long as you also have the main keyword phrase in your writing you'll still trigger the main ads. Just make sure that it will be a match for your searcher's interests.

What kind of phrases don't have a lot of advertisers? Things like philosophy, literature, religion, and the like often have few ads. Let's look at the phrase postmodern literature. According to the SEO Book keyword tool, this gets over 300 searches a day, but I don't see a single ad displayed when I do a search on Google. So if you write a wonderful article on this topic and get it ranked, you'll probably have plenty of views but very few clicks.

How Much Do Clicks Pay?

Another thing we should consider in our quest for profitable keywords is how much each click will pay us. Now, you won't be able to determine this completely, but you can get a general idea. As a basic rule, if the service or product will cost a lot, the click will reflect that. So topics such as insurance, credit cards, and trendy health topics will be the highest paying.

We're going to analyze a few keywords on a website called Spyfu.com. Now, this tool is for people who are planning on using Adwords to advertise and not for people who are hoping to make money through Adsense. Because of this, you are seeing the number that they would have to pay and not how much money you would get per click. You may be seeing only half this number or even less. But it is still helpful because you'll be able to compare keywords and see which ones are the most profitable.

Type in the word or phrase and it will show you the cost per click range and the number of advertisers. For example, right now credit cards show a range of $0.92 - $15.28. So these keywords would be profitable if we could rank for them. Compare that with cat trees, which has a range of $0.42 - $1.11. Still a decent range, but not as high. Then we look at fantasy novel, which has only five advertisers who pay an average of $0.25 - $0.53.

Search Network Vs Content Network

I want to make one last note in this section. The tools we are looking at give us a good idea of the advertisers for the search network. That is, the advertisers who pop up when you do a search in Google. Here at InfoBarrel, we are part of the Content Network. Advertisers often pay less for their ads displayed on webpages than they do for the search. So keep this in mind when you are trying to determine how much you will be paid per click.

So you have a list of profitable keywords that you are ready to write articles about. But you need to do one more thing, and that is to check the strength of the competition. That will be covered in part 3.